I'd consider myself to be one of these developers. I don't blog, I don't Tweet, and my public GH contributions are sparse at best. I'm a fairly senior engineer in a large company. What bothers me about this post is the idea that I must be lagging behind on using the newest technologies just because I don't Tweet about it?
Conferences, in my experience, are mostly a waste of time. I can usually watch the keynotes online after the fact if I care to. I'm not interested in joining discussion groups and posting; like the vast majority of people, I'm content to lurk, but I'm not blind!
So yeah, I'd be very comfortable challenging a light-visible developer on pushing/using new technology and generally being aware of the landscape. I just don't care to talk about it constantly.
While I’m not in this group since I have a hard time detaching from work, I think Anthony Bourdain summed this up well.
“I'll generally take a standup mercenary who takes pride in his professionalism over an artist any day. When I hear 'artist', I think of someone who doesn't think it necessary to show up at work on time. More often than not their efforts, convinced as they are of their own genius, are geared more to giving themselves a hard-on than satisfying the great majority of dinner customers. Personally, I'd prefer to eat food that tastes good and is an honest reflection of its ingredients, than a 3-foot-tall caprice constructed from lemon grass, lawn trimmings, coconuts and red curry.”
Great quote. It applies to pretty much any profession that isn't pure art. Knowing how it works in medical and research fields, it would be a great analogy for that too.
good luck developing new dishes without artists. Maybe you don't want a "a 3-foot-tall caprice constructed from lemon grass, lawn trimmings, coconuts and red curry" but A) that sounds fucking delicious to me and B) in the same way that fashion houses present ideas that are then digested and disseminated into consumer clothing lines, culinary artists also provide an essential service in pushing the art of food forward.
that's such an unnecessarily disparaging remark that I kind of don't even know how to take it (or him) seriously.
I think you focused too much on that part. The overall point (artists are self absorbed and unprofessional) is really hard to argue against to anyone who has spent any time out in the world
And you don't even need to go that far. Bourdain is talking in the context of running a successful restaurant -- serving quality food to customers that they want, on time. The artist can be everything GP said they were and still be inferior to the mercenary in that context.
I think the fact you’re commenting here at all, sharing your thoughts and choosing to make yourself heard, sort of excludes you from the silent dark matter group, no? It’s no shining badge of merit, but I do think that being on HN at all, choosing to spend our time learning and conversing about our career field, is a fairly strong group-signal in and of itself.
I’ve worked at tiny startups all the way to big tech and immediately had a few people come to mind when I read the description. A lot of them were really into sports or the arts or had a busy family, often this meant that outside of the function of our very specific role, they never really had much to say about tech or programming. That’s a really good thing though! I think it’s a drag spending all day with people whose interests are too similar to mine, it gets really stale. I’d much rather hear about how Dan’s hockey team’s doing than yet another debate about LLMs :)
> I think the fact you’re commenting here at all, sharing your thoughts and choosing to make yourself heard, sort of excludes you from the silent dark matter group, no?
Come now, if your definition is so strict then nobody is in that group. Its a very far cry from youtubers/guest speakers etc.
There are degrees of everything but I'm sure there is a non-trivial subset of developers/engineers who don't blog/write, post on social media professionally, attend conferences. Maybe a lot of them are just 99% dark because they posted on HN a few times. But you might be surprised at how many people are nearly invisible on the web--and certainly professionally.
An underappreciated aspect of all this: how many people are under NDA?
There's no upside to me talking about my current work and I might accidentally breach NDA, so I don't. I feel I can give detail-stripped war stories from previous jobs, though.
(Working on WinCE was very much being a "dark matter" developer, because there's almost no user community at all. And a good example of the NDA problem: you get some of the source to Windows CE, which you can't really discuss in public because it's copyright Microsoft)
Or they have security clearances etc. I'm sure I know quite a few people who go "Hmm. My employer doesn't even really want us posting on social media so on the one hand maybe I can earn a few Internet points. On the other hand, I could get fired. Tough call. (Not.)"
I worked for 3 years at Ab Initio, a software company with an ETL product which is - honestly - phenomenally good and worlds above anything else in the space, open source or not. (It was designed and is still mostly developed by graybeard former Symbolics and Thinking Machines Corp. hackers.)
And I never blogged or spoke a word about it, because it's absolutely forbidden both by rule and by company culture.
Given they make money hand over fist... I think they're doing just fine with their current strategy. I obviously can't give details, but they basically print money.
Many of those corps also have restrictions on speaking/posting publicly as well, and something like setting up a blog or Youtube channel would need legal approval. Some even ban public posting on social media and forums. These restrictions are not just on confidential content as well, but on literally anything you post publicly (as it may affect how others view the company). Due to IP agreements anything you post is also considered corporate IP anyways and thus even commenting on social media is forbidden.
Therefore if you see say a Github user who hides behind their screen name, or a HN commenter who purposesly keeps their job details vague, that could be someone who doesn't want to be dark matter - but the company policies force them to hide that way.
Even the idea that new tech is somehow worth our time and attention because it is new is extremely presumptuous. It disrespects my time by trading it for the cheap fashion and marketing of industry.
The problem with your model is that it relies on there being “proven” technologies to begin with, but who is going to prove them if not those very groups you deride? You’re proving the necessity of the early adopters and hype suckers if anything.
Couldn't one make the point that those early adopters in orgs that can afford to take on the risks pave the way for everyone else? And eventually, once some technologies survive and others die off for a variety of reasons, people with deadlines to meet (more limited amount of time and resources to invest in getting something working) can just build off of the success of others?
>The problem with your model is that it relies on there being “proven” technologies to begin with
This takes overthinking to a new level. Of course there are proven technologies - used with success for decades, known for their stability, etc. I'm pretty sure one can find arguments against any of them. But we do have a general (not unanimous) consensus, even if it hasn't been cast into stone. For example that Python is tried and mature for data science, or that C++ has proven itself in games, and Java in enterprise and application server programming, and so on.
>but who is going to prove them if not those very groups you deride
Actual domain experience from millions of developers, and observation of decade(s) of use, stability, and known upsides/downsides?
Nobody waited for hipster programmers to declare mature technologies. Their "job" is to hype new stuff. If it evolves into something mature, they go to the next shiny thing.
The dividing line between hipster programmers and “engineers” is nonexistent. They are just other programmers. Those millions of developers didn’t hop on the bandwagon just because Java was sitting there, it required a lot of forward-thinking, high-skill people to get off the ground. And they were hipsters at the time.
>Those millions of developers didn’t hop on the bandwagon just because Java was sitting there, it required a lot of forward-thinking, high-skill people to get off the ground. And they were hipsters at the time.
Nah, I was there "at the time", and this is bad example. Java got traction because of marketing to corporate departments, not because of "forward-thinking, high-skill people" driving it. It was literally the first language that came with a full blown, tens-of-millions, commercial hype campaign.
In any case, the early adopters were neither "hipsters" nor more mature "engineer" types. It was the duped-by-hipsters types, but at that time enticed by marketing.
The kind of hipsters described above and in abundance 2023 (or even 2010) sense hardly existed back then (Java caught on during 1997-2000), and even when, very rarely, they did, they didn't have the means and captive audience to make their hype be adopted (people hyped things like Ada, Smalltalk, Lisp, Eiffel, and other lost causes). Back then it was mostly marketing driven hype, sold to corporate decision makers.
Modern hipster devs came about with blogs, social media, the proliferation of conferences, the rise of startups as we know them today when they recovered after the dot-com boom,
and companies like Google and Facebook fighting it out for developer influence.
You wrote about me deriding bald people in this thread (telling me it's bad "to deride people who have no hair"). My response above was about that: that I did no such thing. I mentioned bald people vs people with hair as an example of a sorites ("no clear boundaries") problem. Not to cluster them with hype-promoting developers (that doesn't even make sense).
As for the others types that you mention, sure: the very purpose of the original comment was to deride people promoting hype.
It's impressive the lengths you'll go to avoid seeing the point. My message is, don't write off people just because they appear to be hipsters. Similar to people lacking hair, who are oftentimes the SAME persons as those people having hair, the developers participating in new technologies are often the same as the ones writing in mature codebases.
The "hair' argument becaome so convoluted I don't even know where to address, so let's address your main concern.
Are we allowed to write off people's activity for any reason? Dislike certain trends people follow? Criticize some tendencies or bad habbits? If so, I chose to criticize hype-merchants and write them off (regarding that aspect of their life, I'm sure they could still be wonderful parents, or golf players, or whatever otherwise).
That is what happens when you bring up unrelated topics like hair in a discussion about developers.
The question is, write them off as what? Because as we already established, it requires developers in order to make a technology “mature.” So how does it make sense to write those developers off, when they are necessary to the creation of the thing you want?
I don't find that the process of making a technology mature is the same as it's mass adoption as the hyped new thing.
If anything, the latter leads to the opposite: tons of immature technologies, hyped to high heaven, used by tons of developers who don't know any better, and then discarded as a new shiny thing comes along. Discarded both by users, and their limited-attention-span creators.
> "Newest technologies" are for early adopters and hype suckers. Engineers use proven technologies, not just "newer" for the sake of it.
This is in total opposition to the way I was taught engineering.
New technologies get used in products and projects all the time. There's a discipline called risk analysis where the pros, cons and risks of technological choices are weighted-in to take a decision on whether or not to incorporate them.
The more a given tech is used, the better it's understood, making it less risky to incorporate into larger products.
Engineers also fall victim to hype from time to time, because engineers are human.
It's part of an engineering mindset to trust proven technology, but it's also part of an engineering mindset to make sure you're staying up-to-date with critical changes in your field. Ignoring either for long enough will make you a worse engineer.
>Engineers also fall victim to hype from time to time, because engineers are human.
Sure, just like everybody has shat themselves one time or another, at the very least as a toddler, but perhaps also when they had to make a long run to a remote bathroom after Taco Bell. But there are really people suffering from severe diarrhoea too, and those are two distinct groups.
It's not that engineers are immune to hype. It's that the others are hype-magnets and hype-spreaders.
Doesn't this imply that "hype-magnets" and "hype-spreaders" ("the others") aren't engineers, or couldn't be?
Engineers aren't some special class of human with special brains or pseudo-Vulcan logic that makes it impossible for us to be just as hype-spreading as anyone else.
I think being up to date on new technology puts you clearly not in the “dark matter” camp he’s talking about. There is a lot of development happening in ASP.net, C, Cobol and platforms that have been stable for decades.
[had an extended comment here before but got downvoted by what I can only imagine are people offended by the word “lagging”. Reminder that downvotes on HN are for comments breaking etiquette, not to show disagreement]
> Conferences, in my experience, are mostly a waste of time. I can usually watch the keynotes online after the fact if I care to. I'm not interested in joining discussion groups and posting; like the vast majority of people, I'm content to lurk, but I'm not blind!
And hallway track if you're into that sort of thing (which I am). I do think that, especially with the increase in video we've seen over the past few years, if you're going to conferences to sit in keynotes and breakouts and then head back to your room, they're probably a waste of time and money for you.
I applied to some jobs and they didn't see anything and I got shot every time.
So right now, I publish a lot more, I do this for myself, so not everybody can see me.
My hypothesis, people change the rules a lot and when things start to fall apart the rules. So right now, when I see nothing, there's a big chance that I don't going to this person serious.
Scott should indeed rewrite that article one day (HN: shanselman ... do you read ;)). You are right with this statement. These are two different things which often correlate but not necessarily.
Conferences, in my experience, are mostly a waste of time. I can usually watch the keynotes online after the fact if I care to. I'm not interested in joining discussion groups and posting; like the vast majority of people, I'm content to lurk, but I'm not blind!
So yeah, I'd be very comfortable challenging a light-visible developer on pushing/using new technology and generally being aware of the landscape. I just don't care to talk about it constantly.